Immigration Is Better Than Industrial Policy
We have heard a whole lot over the past eight years about the need to revitalize blue-collar America.
But factories don’t operate because presidents dump billions of borrowed dollars into places chosen for politically strategic reasons. Widgets don’t get made and the supply chain doesn’t keep churning along because the president orders it—no, not even if he uses the word “hereby.”
Mostly, the economy spins ever onward because individuals show up for work and produce something that other people—their employers, customers, clients, donors, etc.—value and are willing to pay for, and then they do it again the next day.
The much-maligned Haitian immigrants in Springfield, Ohio, which has become the center ring of America’s stupidest political circus over the past week, seem to have been doing exactly that: showing up.
“They are assembling car engines at Honda, running vegetable-packing machines at Dole and loading boxes at distribution centers,” The New York Times reported earlier this month. “They are paying taxes on their wages and spending money at Walmart. On Sundays they gather at churches for boisterous, joyful services in Haitian Creole.”
Sen. J.D. Vance’s (R–Ohio) recent criticisms of the Haitian immigrants in Springfield lacked “real knowledge of what the workforce situation in Ohio is,” Ross McGregor, CEO of Pentaflex Inc., which makes brake and axel parts for trucks, told Kevin Williamson for a must-read essay published this week by The Dispatch.
“I don’t think [Vance] really understands from a boots-on-the-ground perspective what employers are dealing with in trying to have a consistent and reliable workforce,” McGregor explained. “If he were to apply a business mindset to this situation, he would see the benefit that we get from simply being able to rely on somebody coming to work every day.” (Emphasis added)
A Republican Party that was less blindfolded by its nativism and less committed to reassuring its supporters that cultural change is always bad—as opposed to being a natural part of the modern world, and a necessary part of a functioning, dynamic economy—would see an opportunity to tell a different kind of story about Springfield. After all, the Haitians in Springfield are simply the latest chapter in the story of Ohio: a story that includes waves of immigrants from Ireland, Germany, and other parts of the world who came to Ohio to take the same sort of bottom-rung jobs and begin the process of working their way up the American economic ladder.
If acknowledging the reality of the role that immigration has played in America’s history is too much, a saner group of Republicans
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